Books: The geek, the academic, the hippie and the peasant ..

... all will work together to create things in the new collaborative society that the web has made possible, enthuses this author. Colin Tweedy catches his optimism.

by

Published: 01 Mar 2008

Last Updated: 31 Aug 2010

I am not the obvious reviewer of a book on the power of the web, being a
technophobe who until a few years ago had to ask my assistant to print
out my e-mails. But although I found the argument difficult at first, I
was gripped by Charles Leadbeater's erudition and passion for the
subject.

Leadbeater is an optimist about the information technology revolution.
He notes Richard Sennett's pessimism in his own observations on the
internet, and although Leadbeater admits that the web is 'tailor-made
for shadow networks of shadowy people', he believes that the web is
transforming our world for the better.

I must admit to disliking Leadbeater's title We-Think. It is his term
for how, thanks to the web, we can come to think, work, play and create
en masse, and therefore co-exist. I much prefer his description of the
phenomenon as a hybrid of 'the geek, the academic, the hippie and the
peasant'. But Leadbeater's argument - that creativity in science,
culture, business and academia emerges when people with different
vantage points, skills and knowhow combine their ideas to produce
something new - is attractive. He sees the web as providing us with a
platform that lets us be creative on a scale previously
unimaginable.

I find fascinating Leadbeater's analysis that the medium, at its best,
is our version of the 18th-century coffee house, the forerunner of
learned societies that fuelled not only the Enlightenment but so much of
our scientific and industrial revolutions.

Collaborative creativity has been a goal of mankind since the fall of
church supremacy. Creativity and innovation have become the modern Holy
Grail and we have all been struggling to find this intellectual path to
righteousness.

The book's theme is as big and as bold as it gets. Its thesis is that
'we are witnessing the birth of a different way of approaching how we
organise ourselves, one that offers significant opportunities to improve
how we work, consume and innovate'. In the 20th century, its author
argues, we were identified by what we owned; in the 21st century, we
will be defined by how we share and what we give away.

Leadbeater observes that the culture being created by the web is an
amalgam of post-industrial and anti-industrial ideology, set against the
revival of pre-industrial ideas of organisation. He sees the web as
encouraging and reviving the social approach to creativity, by
empowering a mass of amateur folk to create and show content. In 1993,
just 130 websites existed in the world, but by mid-2007 there were 135
million registered host names and 61 million active sites - revealing
the fact that millions of people are content-creators as well as
receivers. Over the next few years, says Leadbeater, we will see the
growth of a vast digitally enabled vernacular culture that will be more
collaborative and creative - and more democratic - than anything we have
seen before.

But he also notes that it will be raucous and out of control. People
will be creating art they enjoy rather than relying on the
cookie-cutting culture so beloved of state-funded bureaucrats. The
spread of the web will mean that more people than ever will 'have their
say, post their comment, make a video, show a picture and write a
song'.

The writing of the Bible could be seen as one of the first series of
texts to be created by such a collaborative process. The Iliad and The
Odyssey also developed over many years, with contributions from hundreds
of poets from all over the Greek world. With the web, we now have a
vehicle that can reduce the act of creation from centuries to weeks and
even days.

But the web is not only a new way to illuminate and transform ancient
means of creation. Leadbeater charts the myriad ways in which the web is
changing so much of our lives. He comes up with many memorable phrases
and sentences like 'the camera-phone is now a ubiquitous tool for
citizen journalism'. It's staggering how open-source concepts have
transformed the web into a place where contributors seem to be
interested not in legal protections but in the freedom to share
knowledge.

Leadbeater does not labour over the potential (or actual) dangers,
though he does observe that 'politicians could easily lord it over a
Lilliputian rabble of ill-equipped, amateur bloggers'. Blogging, in my
opinion, could become the self-abuse of the 21st century. It may not, as
the old wives' tale goes, make you go blind, but it can blind the user
or abuser to honesty or sensitivity.

In his chapter 'The We-Think Business', Leadbeater is sharp on many
business models. 'A job is now a set of tasks rather than a craft
demanding devotion,' he observes, and 'leadership has become little more
than bonus-driven performance management'.

His argument that the We-Think philosophy offers capitalism a way to
recover the social or even communal dimension that people at work are
yearning for is a compelling one. Whether you accept it or not,
Leadbeater's book should be compulsory reading for all who seek to
understand the driving force of this century.